BEACHWOOD, Ohio - A domed chapel decorated with historic stained-glass windows will be the heart of an 18-month expansion and renovation designed to turn the eastern home of Temple-Tifereth Israel into a full-service congregational center.

The $24 million project, now underway and scheduled for completion in the early fall of 2016, will significantly remake the Temple's Beachwood facility at 26000 Shaker Blvd., originally built in 1970 as a religious school, Rabbi Richard Block said in an interview last month.

The deal with CWRU enabled the congregation to ensure the long-term future of the 1924 University Circle building, while retaining access for 99 years to use it for eight days a year on major holidays and for additional events as negotiated with CWRU.

The Temple entered the arrangement because the geographic core of its congregation had moved into Cleveland's eastern suburbs, and because it couldn't afford to maintain both the Beachwood facility and the University Circle building.

Block estimated that the older structure, which was seeing less and less use, needed $12 million to $15 million to address deferred maintenance.

Yet the Temple also felt a serious obligation to the older structure, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is considered one of the most architecturally important religious structures in Cleveland.

CWRU came to the rescue by investing $64 million in an expansion and renovation scheduled for completion in September, which will turn the University Circle building into a new home for its departments of dance, theater and music.

The building will also anchor an eventual western expansion of CWRU's campus on 21 acres of largely vacant land west of East 105th Street.

But given that the Beachwood facility is truly now the Temple's true main facility, it needed its own hefty investment to function like one, the rabbi said.

"What this project is doing is transforming this physical plant into a full-service congregational home," he said.

The permanent shift to the east, from University Circle to Beachwood, is the latest step in the congregation's long history. Founded in 1850 as an offshoot of Anshe Chesed, now Fairmount Temple, the Temple is the second-oldest existing Jewish congregation in Greater Cleveland, according to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.

Elements of the project include adding a new front entrance and lobby, expanding a garden for outdoor services and augmenting the building's religious school with a new early childhood education wing and rooms for children in grades 4-7, whose Sunday classes are now held at the nearby Siegal College.

A new glass-enclosed Center for Judaic Art, Religion and Culture, visible from the Beachwood Temple's new lobby, will display portions of its nationally respected collection of 1,900 examples of Judaic art.

The design will also make a major nod toward the University Circle building, designed by Boston architect Charles Greco with an unusual, seven-sided sanctuary topped by a golden-hued dome that for many decades has been the symbol of the congregation.

And that explains why the new chapel at the Temple's Beachwood facility will feature a dome.

"The dome is a memory of the University Circle building, plus the closeness of heaven and earth," said Mark Simon, a partner at Centerbrook.

The domed chapel and adjacent lobby will feature a luminous vestige of the University Circle facility - a collection of 15 stained-glass windows designed by the important 20th-century artist, illustrator and fierce anti-Hitler activist Arthur Szyk, who died in 1951 at age 57.

Luminous stained glass

Designed in a gemlike style that evokes medieval European art, the Szyk windows are dedicated to 765 men and women of the congregation who served in the armed forces in World War II.

A dozen of the windows, completed in 1947, are emblazoned with the names of 22 congregants who died in the war. The other three windows, nicknamed the "warrior windows," feature vivid portrayals of biblical Hebrew warriors Gideon, Samson and Judah Maccabee.

Originally installed in the Gries Memorial Chapel at the University Circle building, the windows are now being restored by Whitney Stained Glass in Cleveland and prepared for reinstallation in Beachwood. The Beachwood project is an encore for Centerbrook, which also designed the 2005 Park Synagogue East building at 27500 Shaker Blvd. in Pepper Pike, a half-mile east of the Temple facility.

Simon said he knew his firm couldn't repeat the design for Park, but said there's little danger of that because the Temple's design arose out of its particular site and needs.

For Park East, Centerbrook designed a chapel with a sweeping, curved roof sheathed in copper panels. For the Temple, the chapel dome is the big gesture, along with a smaller, second dome over the facility's new main entry.

Simon said the wall would give physical form to Abba Hillel Silver's efforts to support the founding of Israel. The stone will also provide a sense of physical linkage to the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage, which stands adjacent to the Temple on the Beachwood property.